"Two months ago, the Brazilian Linux community gathered around BR-Linux invited Novell to answer 10 questions sent and selected by the users, about the company's stance on Linux, open source, licenses, document formats and other subjects." "Novell has been very consistent on this issue and we have publicly stated that we do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents. That being said, our agreement with Microsoft takes the patent issue off the table for customers. We have simply made the patent issue a non-event as part of a customer buying decision."

Others are easily fixable (typos) or revisable (eliminating VML from the next version of the spec).

If Office 2007 produces documents with VML in it (as a result of legacy Office documents being opened and saved) then on a practical level, this is absolutely meaningless.

Regardless of whether you allow KParts or Bonobo or anything else, you still need a viewer for that embedded element and the document wouldn't work on the alternate platform anyway. The same is true of ODF or any other format which allows embedding data and rendering instructions from outside apps.

The difference is that ODF references standards that have largely been implemented elsewhere in the open source world, such as SVG. Anyone implementing OOXML will need to recreate large amounts of technology that only runs on Windows.

This doesn't make an actual difference for interoperability, because one would only presume docs to be interoperable if they stay within the standard and are produced solely by the standardized implementation...

Do you have something specific here from these comments, or is there some set of specific complaints that you think will make OOXML unimplementable by outsiders?

I would suggest some serious reading before asking that question, because it has been done to death.

(Incidentally, check out Jody Goldberg's post on dealing with SpreadsheetML for Gnumeric:

Have you seen how utterly basic that example file is? People have macros, charts, formulas etc. etc. in the real world. Jody also tells us this:

"Brianís example of Numbers reading an OOX file written by Gnumeric could just as easily been an XLS file.....In contrast XLSX may be ugly, but itíís concepts were very familiar from XLS. We already had much of the code required to handle it."

So in order to handle a naively simple spreadsheet file, they already largely had what they needed to implement it having mucked about with XLS for several years? Well that's just brilliant, and not exactly a ringing endorsement for OOXML.

I would advise reading Stephane Rodriguez's comments in that article for a fuller picture.

Have you seen Stephane Rodriguez's comments?? He's not exaclty an unbiased or particularly polite commenter. He goes around calling people "bitches."

What you've shown is that there are features in Office which do not fall under the purview of the OOXML standard. So what? If you want to interchange documents, then don't use those features. If you're writing an app which has special processing instructions (say, for instance AppleScript from iWork), you can include your stuff in the container as well without any problems. Can you explain why you think the BIN parts are a problem?

Have you seen Stephane Rodriguez's comments?? He's not exaclty an unbiased or particularly polite commenter. He goes around calling people "bitches."

I haven't seen him call anyone that, but I daresay that everyone calls somebody something at some point. I'd rather just focus on the content of what he's saying to be perfectly honest, rather than this idiotic name calling when people have nothing left to say.

What you've shown is that there are features in Office which do not fall under the purview of the OOXML standard. So what?

Because Office 2007 is the only test container anyone has for testing OOXML compliance, since Microsoft hasn't provided anything else.

If you want to interchange documents, then don't use those features.

Then you'll end up with practically nothing that you can implement, and nothing that you can work with from people sending you documents produced in Office 2007. No interoperability, in other words.

If you're writing an app which has special processing instructions (say, for instance AppleScript from iWork), you can include your stuff in the container as well without any problems.

Yer, and that can be done with ODF as well in the instances where you really need to do that. However, it kills interoperability because it depends on all the various applications being able to understand what is there.

Extensions like that have absolutely no place in a completely new format that Microsoft has come up with to supposedly open the innards of Office in the name of interoperability. It's a contradiction in terms. There's no reason for them to be there.

Can you explain why you think the BIN parts are a problem?

That should be obvious. Because no application apart from Office can feasibly do anything about them (we now have BIFF12. Yay!). The average cross section of Excel documents are an awful lot more complex than a couple of columns of numbers, and are full of embedded objects and macros. The workbook, styles and other parts are also BIN parts as opposed to XML parts as well.

Whichever way that you cut this, on a practical level interoperability is just a sad joke.